The endangered future of the past

Such record prices for antiquities ring louder than the lamentations of any archaeologist over the destruction of clues to the ancient world.

A number of news organizations reported on Sotheby's auction on Dec. 5 in New York, but their headlines tell only part of the story: "Ancient figure of lion shatters record price for sculpture at auction" (BBC World News); "Sculpture as old as civilization tops $65m" (The Sydney Morning Herald); "Tiny lioness figure fetches hefty $57M U.S. at auction" (CBC).

Why not simply say: "Loot and you will make vast sums of money!"

Despite all of the hard-fought countermeasures against the looting of archaeological sites, such headlines only add impetus to trade in the illegal art market. To be sure, much legislation is in place that forbids the selling of looted antiquities, but where there is the lure of millions, too many people are willing to take their chances.

$57 million - $57.2 million, to be precise - is certainly a record. And of course the news has to be reported. But the way it's reported is another matter. Many archaeologists have a different side to the story. Figurines like the 5,000 year old Guennol Lioness may be art, but they are a lot of other things as well.

Referred to as a "storied figure" in the media, the statue's provenance was affiliated with ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), presumably to aggrandize the artifact's popular image and monetary value.

Based on comparisons with cylinder seal impressions of the same time period, the figurine is likely to have originated in Iran - Khuzistan to be specific - as it is considered by art historians to be a product of "proto-Elamite" culture in early 3rd millennium BC.

Every bit of pottery, every single stone, every "storied figure" is caught in a complex web of relations. And for every undocumented intrusion, we lose the ability to trace the constellation of connections that all things in situ hold.

Yet after the dust has settled, we can tell you a great deal about looters' trenches, possibly even where they made camp and what meals they ate, but very little about what they displaced.

No piece of antiquity is a discrete or stable entity. Consider, for instance, the set of cuneiform tablets unearthed by archaeologists in a house belonging to a singer named Ur-Utu in ancient Sippar-Amnanum (modern Tell ed-Der), an Old Babylonian (early 2nd millennium BC) city in Iraq immediately southwest of Baghdad.

According to the Belgian excavators of the site, Ur-Utu kept upwards of 2,000 tablets in his house. When it caught fire, perhaps in 1,629 BC (a year suggested by date of the last tablet in the archive), someone, possibly Ur-Utu himself, attempted to rescue some of the tablets, leaving the remainder of the archive behind.

While fleeing the fire, this person apparently stumbled, dropping the documents in the middle of a room. They lay on the floor for over 3,600 years, until archaeologists unearthed them in the mid 1970s.

The detailed archaeological circumstances in which the Ur-Utu cuneiform tablets were excavated have enabled archaeologists and philologists to carefully trace a captivating set of connections between multiple documents and Ur-Utu's private life.

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These documents take us into the intimacies of a landholder's livelihood. Each is set in relation to an archive of harvest accounts kept in a domestic space by a landowning singer. But each can also be a text of contemporary study, an object for museum display, or a document worth risking one's life over.

Severed from the detailed chains of connection suggested by archaeological provenance, the many lives of such things are simply erased and that wonderful adjective "storied" shrinks to cover a situation that tells us loads about the contemporary art market; "storied" becomes replete with nice quotable statements like "brilliant combination of an animal form and human pose" - the assessment of the head of Sotheby's antiquities department; "storied" designates many connections made on the basis of comparative assessments of design and material after the fact.

We are left with loads of airy suppositions and few concrete associations: "the finest sculpture on earth" (Sotheby's News Release). "Its powerful torso and stylized limbs have reminded some scholars of the art of the Cycladic civilization, which flourished about the same time in the eastern Mediterranean" (Sydney Morning Herald).

Such is an apposite comparison. The appreciation of Cycladic "art" has betrothed future generations masses of highly aestheticized objects with absolutely no provenance. There may not be any unnoted Cycladic cemeteries left.

As if to add insult to injury, the buyer of the lioness went on record as describing himself as an archaeologist. $57.2 million accounts for over a quarter of the total budget allocated to the social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate under the National Sciences Foundation for 2008.

This directorate encompasses, among other fields, anthropology, archaeology, political science, linguistics, non-medical sociology and social psychology.

Do the math. A 3.5-inch figurine has sold for more than the entire NSF budget for archaeology next year. The buyer was no archaeologist.

Like environmentalists who would have everyone pay (and quite rightly) a certain percentage of the cost for every gallon of gas to cover clean air initiatives, why not devise a "future of the past surcharge" for every single antiquity sold?

Under such a plan, money would be siphoned off the top of such record amounts and funneled into most necessary programs aimed at curbing the looting of antiquities around the world. At least then, in addition to the dire consequences we have pointed out, rising antiquities prices may have a positive outcome as well.

Unlike environmentalists, archaeologists cannot hope for a future of alternative fuels. A collectively shared past is continuously and violently being destroyed by practices of looting and circulating antiquities.

Headlines announcing antiquities at record prices will not help this dreadful situation. This is why we have to constantly remind readers, hot on the heels of every headline if need be, that we don't have the luxury of any future alternative in the wake of such looting.

Once excavated, the material past is radically transformed. The damage is irreversible.

Omur Harmansah is an assistant professor, and Christopher Witmore a post-doctoral research associate, at the Artemis A. W. and Martha Sharp Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.

A version of this article appears in print on December 21, 2007, in The International Herald Tribune. Today's Paper|Subscribe